The Gods of Pegāna

The Gods of Pegāna

cover of The Gods of Pegāna
Author Lord Dunsany
Illustrator Sidney Sime
Cover artist Sidney Sime
Country UK
Language English
Genre Fantasy short stories
Publisher Elkin Mathews, 1905, Pegana Press, 1911
Publication date
 1905
Media type Print (hardback)
Pages 94 pp
Followed by Time and the Gods

The Gods of Pegāna is the first book by Anglo-Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, published on a commission basis in 1905. The book was reviewed favourably but as an unusual piece. One of the more influential reviews was by Edward Thomas in the London Daily Chronicle.[1]

The book is a series of short stories linked by Dunsany's invented pantheon of deities who dwell in Pegāna. It was followed by a further collection Time and the Gods and by some stories in The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories and in Tales of Three Hemispheres. In 1919 Dunsany told an American interviewer "In The Gods of Pegana I tried to account for the ocean and the moon. I don't know whether anyone else has ever tried that before".[2]

The book contains a range of illustrations by Sidney Sime, the originals of all of which can be seen at Dunsany Castle.

Aside from its various stand-alone editions, the complete text of the collection is included in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), in The Complete Pegāna (1998), and in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks omnibus Time and the Gods (2000).[3]

Contents

  • "Preface"
  • "The Gods of Pegāna"
  • "Of Skarl the Drummer"
  • "Of the Making of the Worlds"
  • "Of the Game of the Gods"
  • "The Chaunt of the Gods"
  • "The Sayings of Kib"
  • "Concerning Sish"
  • "The Sayings of Slid"
  • "The Deeds of Mung"
  • "The Chaunt of the Priests"
  • "The Sayings of Limpang-Tung"
  • "Of Yoharneth-Lahai"
  • "Of Roon, the God of Going"
  • "The Revolt of the Home Gods"
  • "Of Dorozhand"
  • "The Eye in the Waste"
  • "Of the Thing That Is Neither God Nor Beast"
  • "Yonath the Prophet"
  • "Yug the Prophet"
  • "Alhireth-Hotep the Prophet"
  • "Kabok the Prophet"
  • "Of the Calamity That Befel Yūn-Ilāra by the Sea, and of the Building of the Tower of the Ending of Days"
  • "Of How the Gods Whelmed Sidith"
  • "Of How Imbaun Became High Prophet in Aradec of All the Gods Save One"
  • "Of How Imbaun Met Zodrak"
  • "Pegāna"
  • "The Sayings of Imbaun"
  • "Of How Imbaun Spake of Death to the King"
  • "Of Ood"
  • "The River"
  • "The Bird of Doom and the End"

Reception

New York Times critic John Corbin described Dunsany's debut collection as "an attempt to create an Olympus of his own and people it with an assemblage of deities, each with a personality and a power over human life acutely conceived and visualized ... To me, [the collection] is autobiography, and all the more self-revealing because it is profoundly unconscious. As an achievement of the imagination", Corbin concluded, "this bible of the gods of Pegana is simply amazing".[4]

Gahan Wilson praised The Gods of Pegana as "a wonderfully sustained exercise in totally ironic fantasy which may never be beaten. Speaking in a highly original mix of King James Bible English, Yeatsian syntax, and Scheherazadian imagery, [Dunsany] introduces us to a wonderfully sinister Valhalla populated with mad, spectacularly cruel and wonderfully silly gods ... whose only genuine amusement appears to derive from the inventive damage they inflict upon their misbegotten worshippers".[5] E. F. Bleiler lauded the collection as "a convincing, marvelous creation of an alien cosmology".[6]

S. T. Joshi, noting that Dunsany was reading Nietzsche at the time he was writing The Gods of Pegana, declared it "an instantiation of the quintessential act of fantasy: the creation of a new world. Dunsany has simply carried the procedure one step further than any of his conceivable predecessors -- William Beckford (Vathek), William Morris with his medieval fantasies -- by inventing an entire cosmogony ... Dunsany embodies his new realm with his own philosophical predilections, and these predilections -- although expressed in the most gorgeously evocative of prose-poetry -- are of a very modern, even radical sort".[7]

The pantheon

Mana-Yood-Sushai

The chief of the gods of Pegāna is Mana-Yood-Sushai, who created the other gods and then fell asleep; when he wakes, he "will make again new gods and other worlds, and will destroy the gods whom he hath made." Men may pray to "all the gods but one"; only the gods themselves may pray to Mana-Yood-Sushai.

Skarl the Drummer

After Mana-Yood-Sushai "made the gods and Skarl", Skarl made a drum and beat on it in order to lull his creator to sleep; he keeps drumming eternally, for "if he cease for an instant then Mana-Yood-Sushai will start awake, and there will be worlds nor gods no more". Dunsany writes that

Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they be dreams that arise in the mind of MANA because of the drumming of Skarl, as one may dream whose rest is troubled by sound of song, but none knoweth, for who hath heard the voice of Mana-Yood-Sushai, or who hath seen his drummer?

The small gods

Besides MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, there are numerous other gods in Pegāna's pantheon, known as the small gods:

The thousand home gods

According to Roon, the God of Going, "There are a thousand home gods, the little gods that sit before the hearth and mind the fire--there is one Roon."[19] These home gods include:

Trogool, neither god nor beast

Trogool is the mysterious thing, sat at the very south pole of the cosmos and whose duty is to turn over the pages of a great book, in which the very history writes itself every day until the end of the world. The fully written pages are "black", meaning the night, and when it is turned, then the white page symbolizes a new day. Trogool never answers prayer, and the pages that had been turned shall never be turned back, neither by him nor anyone.

Trogool is the Thing that men in many countries have called by many names, IT is the Thing that sits behind the gods, whose book is the Scheme of Things.

References

  1. ↑ Review included in Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany, edited by S. T. Joshi, Scarecrow Press, August 22, 2013
  2. ↑ M. K. Wisehart, "Ideals and Fame: A One-Act Conversation With Lord Dunsany," New York Sun Book World, October 19, 1919, p.25
  3. ↑ ISFDB publication history
  4. ↑ "The Gods of Dunsany", The New York Times, January 26, 1919 (Arts & Leisure)
  5. ↑ "Books", Realms of Fantasy, October 1998, p.14
  6. ↑ E. F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Kent State University Press, 1983 p.104)
  7. ↑ "Introduction", The Complete Pegana: All the Tales Pertaining to the Fabulous Realm of Pegana, Chaosium, 1998, p.viii
  8. ↑ The Sayings of Kib
  9. ↑ Concerning Sish
  10. ↑ The Deeds of Mung
  11. ↑ The Sayings of Slid
  12. ↑ The Sayings of Limpang Tung
  13. ↑ Of Yoharneth-Lahai
  14. ↑ Of Roon, The God of Going...
  15. ↑ Of Dorozhand
  16. ↑ The Eye in the Waste
  17. ↑ The River
  18. ↑ The Bird of Doom and the End
  19. ↑ Of Roon, the God of Going, and the Thousand Home Gods

Bibliography

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